


Mockingbird & Mourning Dove

by kvikindi



Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 19:04:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10668903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: Cary & Kerry Loudermilk through the years: a series of vignettes.





	1. Chapter 1

Four years before she gave birth to a son who was also a daughter, Irma Loudermilk won first place in the Women’s Fancy Dance category at the Twenty-First Annual Crow Fair Pow Wow. She danced with a shawl she had sewn herself: bright red with a blue and white diamond pattern, and almost two feet of silver fringe. Someone took a photograph of her in full dancing regalia, her cheeks slightly flushed and her feathers crooked in her hair. She framed the photograph and kept it. She was eighteen years old. People said she was the best fancy dancer that the Fort Peck Indian Reservation had ever produced. A year later, she married Ray White Cloud, whose favorite dance was the kind you did at closing time in honky tonk bars, boots shuffling in a halting, tender, too-close two-step. He had a big smile and a job as a lumber salesman, and he said, Let’s move to the city, and Irma said, Yes. And that was the end of her fancy dancing.

Much later, after Ray had left, when they had moved from Billings to Missoula, and Irma was working night shifts as a nurse, Cary (Kerry) would creep into the closet where she kept her fancy dance shawl, and unpack it from layers of tissue paper, and wrap himself in it. Wrap _themselves_. Because back then it was just Cary, but now when they remember it they are two, two people who remember the red gabardine with its ribbonwork diamonds, the smell of camphor, the shimmy of fringe. They had never seen someone fancy dancing. But it was easy to imagine it: their mother twirling like a beautiful leaf in a storm, lightweight and happy, laughing with her head thrown back. Her happiness clung to the shawl, to the satin ribbons. Cary (Kerry) pressed their face into it, as though they might be able to inhale those lost molecules. As though happiness could be exhumed and absorbed through the skin.

They knew without being told that their house was not happy. So maybe happiness _could_ be absorbed through the skin, and the absence of it made a physical difference, like silence you heard with your whole body. They also knew, through some accident of that same skin-prickling radar, that they both were and were not the source of this unhappiness. That this was a paradox didn’t cause them much worry— certainly not by the time Cary was ten, when being two things at once had come to seem like a normal way of living. They were two people who were one person some of the time, or one person who was sometimes two people; they were part Indian and part white, but each of these parts was a whole person; they were part girl and part boy, but again, neither of these parts seemed especially like a _part_. However you figured it, there was always too much of them.

This might not have been a problem, in spite of the fact that the world seemed predicated on the notion that everyone was just one person, discrete, singular, and whole, if it hadn’t been for the realization that came to a head on particular night in June when Irma came home early from a shift and discovered Cary (Kerry) asleep in their bed, wrapped in her shawl.

In the ensuing lecture (which was largely misdirected, since it was Kerry who had wrapped the shawl around a sleeping Cary to keep bad dreams away from him, but Kerry didn’t like to be yelled at, and tended to vanish whenever that seemed imminent) Irma made it clear that the shawl was fragile, and that it would fall apart if they touched it too much. Was that what Cary wanted? Did he want it to fall apart?

No. That wasn’t what Cary or Kerry wanted. But suddenly it seemed clear to them that this, more than anything else, was their special power. They took things that were supposed to be one thing and tore them apart. So what their mother was saying made sense.

After that night, they never touched the shawl again. They would’ve liked to learn to dance, or at least Cary would’ve, but Irma had told him, “Boys don’t do that kind of dancing.” Later, he thought that maybe she’d also meant: _White people don’t do it,_ though he knew that she would never have said such a thing to his face.

He thought that Kerry would have made a wonderful dancer. But when he told her so— she was nine, and he was thirteen— she said, “Dancing’s for sissies,” and socked him in the shoulder so hard it made both of them hurt. She didn’t know why she was so angry. Cary always wanted explanations, but Kerry wasn’t good at explaining things. For a while Cary thought that maybe between the two of them they’d divided up all of one person’s person-stuff, like maybe Cary had gotten most of the words, and Kerry had gotten most of the knowing how what to do with her body. That was why Cary was a geek who had to wear glasses and stumbled over his own two feet, and Kerry could sneak up on him and dunk him in the Clark Fork River, but she couldn’t do anything except throw tantrums when she was angry, or tired, or sad. “Whatever, _geek_ ,” Kerry said when he explained this theory. “See, you admit it, you’re a geek.” And she went back to spinning around in his wobbly desk chair, her insides feeling compressed and strange, like she’d been kicked in the stomach, or like Cary had, maybe. She couldn’t tell whether she wanted them to be parts of the same person, or if she wanted to be a separate person from him.

Later, anyway, he ended up rejecting the idea. Whatever they were was a lot more complicated than that. This was around the time they met Oliver Bird  and Cary started using the word “mutant.” Cary loved being a mutant, but Kerry resented the change; she’d liked that there was no word for what they were. It meant that what they were was more her home turf than Cary’s, maybe even that she was slightly better than he was at being them. Secretly she kept on thinking that this was the case. She sensed that being them was harder for Cary than it was for her, and she thought that this was because they weren’t something that you could put on a microscope slide.

When she thought about what they were, she thought about salmon. She and Cary had once driven up to Flathead Lake during salmon spawning season, in September, right after Cary got his driver’s license. It had been cold, so the summer crowds that crammed the lakeside had thinned out. They’d stopped at a Sinclair station to get some pop and a sandwich, and Kerry showed Cary how to open his pop bottle on the side of a picnic table. “You have to hit it really hard,” she said. Cary had been about to start school at the University of Montana. He’d wanted to explain all about non-native fish species and biological imperatives. Kerry had just wanted to watch the red salmon jumping. They were fierce and ugly and she envied them. She tried to make a face like a salmon, with her jaw jutting out. “Look at me,” she said. “I’m a salmon.” “Does that make me a lake?” Cary asked. Kerry thought about it. She knew what he was saying. “No,” she said. “You’re a salmon too.” As usual, she didn’t know how to explain it. She just knew that both of them were fish, sometimes in and sometimes out of water, always coming or going, surfacing here and there with a splash.

So any kind of fish would have worked in that analogy, really. But Kerry imagined them as bright red salmon with silver fins. She imagined them diamond-patterned all over with scales and twirling through the water. She imagined them moving much too fast for anyone to ever touch.


	2. Chapter 2

Oliver Bird was stylish and smoked cigarettes in little holders. He had a lazy, drawling foreign accent. He was darkly handsome; later Cary and Kerry would find out that he was part-native (Maori, which was like being Indian in New Zealand), but being native didn’t seem to matter one way or the other to him. He treated it like his taste in fast cars or his fondness for oysters: just one more mildly interesting personal fact.

         _Maybe things are different in New Zealand,_ said Kerry.

        Cary said, “Maybe he’s just better adjusted than we are,.”

         _I’d like to use my fist to better adjust his face._

        “Stop it. He’s perfectly nice. He offered to let you ride one of his horses.”

That was another thing about Oliver Bird: he was rich. He owned a ranch up in Shasta County— “Just a few hundred acres,” he’d said offhandedly— that he’d inherited from his grandfather, who’d been some sort of cattle baron. It wasn’t the kind of ranch where he had to do any work. He also owned an penthouse in San Francisco, which was where he spent most of his time. That was how they’d met— well, they’d met outside a seminar on human genetics, at Berkeley, where Cary was doing his medical degree. Cary and Kerry wouldn’t have thought that rich foreigners who owned penthouses and several-hundred-acre ranches (not to mention an Aston Martin and a closet full of flashy suits) would be much interested in human genetics. Even if they were mutants, which was what Oliver said he was— “A new iteration of the _homo_ genus. A genetic aberration. No, not an aberration. An advance.” But Oliver was interested in all sorts of things. Science, poetry, philosophy, music. His mind was a mile-a-minute. Kerry thought it was annoying, but Cary thought he’d been waiting his whole life to find someone who could keep up with him.

        Kerry said, _You only think he’s nice because you want to kiss him._

        “I thought we agreed not to talk about that.”

         _You mean about who you want to kiss? Because it’s Oliver. You want to kiss Oliver Bird._

        “Stop it.”

_You stop it. It’s gross, gross, gross._

Cary had graduated from college at nineteen, gawky and tongue-tied and friendless, unless you counted Kerry as a friend. He’d only ever been kissed once, by a girl at an end-of-term party. Kerry had been scandalized. It was her own fault for eavesdropping, really, but she’d made it very clear to him that their tongue was not going in anyone else’s mouth. The fight they’d had when they got home was one of their worst, Cary yelling that if Kerry didn’t like what he did with _his_ body then she could just get out of it, Kerry materializing and offering to do just that, Cary pointing out that she was technically a little girl and had no family, Kerry threatening to show up on their mother’s doorstep and introduce herself as Irma’s _real_ child. “At least I’m Indian!” she’d said spitefully, at which point Cary had opened and closed his mouth in silence— then said, in a wavering voice, “I think I like boys.” Kerry had said, “I know.” Cary had said, “You don’t understand. I mean I’m an invert.” “I _know._ I know,” Kerry had said.

        “Oliver’s my friend,” Cary said.

         _You just nod and agree with everything he says! Your eyes get all stupid-looking when you’re around him._

        Cary said, “I’m not going to talk to you if you act like a rotten brat.”

         _I’m allowed to act like a brat,_ Kerry said. _I’m twelve._

They thought she was about twelve or thirteen. It was hard to keep track. She’d gone through a growth spurt the last year they’d lived in Montana; she’d had a lot of time to herself while Cary was in class. It was a safe town, and the university was right by the river, at the base of a hill with a climbing path, so she could wear herself out running up to the top, or shinny up trees, or chase beetles and frogs. In Berkeley, she didn’t get out so much. Cary said a twelve-year-old girl couldn’t just wander around San Francisco alone, and made her come to lectures with him. But sooner or later Kerry always got bored, and made a nuisance of herself. She couldn’t help it; if she was restless, then both of them were restless. And she couldn’t do basic physics, much less organic chemistry. Cary said her education was appalling, but she thought he was mostly disappointed she hadn’t turned out more like him. He was a genius. Everyone said so. 

        Cary said, “I don’t know why you’ve made this decision to hate him. He could really help us.”

_We don’t need his money,_ Kerry said.

        “It wouldn’t hurt. The one of us who eats is awfully tired of beans and rice.”

         _He’ll make you eat shark fins and caviar and weird rich people food._

        “I’m almost one hundred percent certain that rich people don’t eat shark fins. 

         _He’ll get you drunk, and I’ll have to suffer through your hangovers._

Oliver was, at any given moment, about forty percent drunk. The day they’d met him, he’d followed them outside the seminar— Kerry had decided she wanted to leave, and had made herself so obnoxious that Cary had eventually given up— and pulled a flask out of his pocket, and offered it to them. “Macallan?” he said, and then, at Cary’s blank look, “Scotch. I know, a little bit stuffy, but I was in a rush. Things to do, dreams to pursue— I’m sure you understand.” He was wearing a silk scarf, a striped shirt, and a maroon velvet blazer. He should’ve looked like he belonged in a bebop club, but some shiver of intensity seemed to be running through him, a nervous subdermal tremor. As Cary and Kerry watched, mesmerized, he lit two cigarettes and passed one over. Cary said, “I’m sorry, I don’t smoke.” Oliver said, with affected casualness, “Right. I forgot. The kid.”

        “All right, so he’s not exactly good country people. We’re expanding our horizons; it’s for the best!”

         _Wide horizons make it easy for other people to hunt you._

        “Well, now you’re just being ridiculous.”

        Kerry didn’t answer.

        Cary asked, “Aren’t you curious to meet more people like us?”

         _Oliver’s not like us_ , Kerry said.

“I dreamed about you,” Oliver had explained, at their look of alarm. “That’s what I do, you see, I dream; that’s my power, my particular… gift.” He exhaled a thin and very artful stream of smoke. He seemed older than Cary, though Cary would learn later that they were actually very close in age; by then, he’d be unable to shake the habit of deferring to Oliver. “Not my only gift, obviously; I have a knack for machine work, and I play a mean trombone, if I do say so myself. Underrated instrument, the trombone.” Cary said, “What do you mean, _power_?” Oliver smiled the smile of an angler who feels the fish take the hook. “I think we should talk about this someplace more private, don’t you?” he’d said. “All three of us.” He’d started to walk away, and right away Cary started to follow, without really meaning to, just like that. _I can’t believe_ you _lectured_ me _about not trusting strangers!_ Kerry hissed at him. “I have a good feeling about this!” Cary hissed back. “I think we can trust him!” “No,” Oliver said. He had stopped, and was watching Cary intently. “You _want_ to trust me, because you barely even dared to believe that someone like me was out there. I don’t blame you.”

        Cary pointed out, “No one’s ever going to be exactly like us.”

         _No_ , Kerry said.

Oliver was the first person they had ever let watch them turn into two people. It felt private, like they’d invited him to watch them undress. Not that there was anything sexual about it— it just meant exposing to another person all the secret parts of how their body worked. Their bod _ies_ , when they were separate in front of him, Cary’s hands sweating so nervously that he had to shove them in his pockets, Kerry glaring and sticking out a sulky lip. Whenever they’d imagined this situation, they’d thought they might be treated like a freak show. Neither of them liked people staring at them. Kerry always took it as a challenge and wanted to start a fight. Cary was self-conscious about his weediness and his coke-bottle glasses. (He was especially self-conscious about these things in front of Oliver, who was so attractive it made Cary’s face go red.) But Oliver seemed delighted by Kerry’s materialization. In fact, he laughed out loud, just a quick little huff-of-breath laugh. He then immediately launched into a run of overexcited questions: Did they share a subconscious, and what did they dream about, and how extraordinary that Kerry didn’t seem to sleep, and did she ever remember Cary’s dreams when _he_ slept? (She did, sometimes, but neither of them knew what a subconscious was, and Cary thought his dreams were pretty ordinary, for the most part.) Cary could tell Kerry’s patience was rapidly dwindling, and that soon she would do something drastic and possibly violent. Fortunately, just then, Oliver stopped and said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that— you’re the first ones I’ve talked to. I think a part of me didn’t really believe that there were other people out there.” He had a strange look on his face, like he was surprised by his own words. Cary thought it was probably the first sincere thing that Oliver had said.

        “Do you wish that there were other people like us?” Cary asked.

         _No. I don’t know. I like that it’s just you and me._

        “But sometimes you wish that other people could understand.”

         _It wears us out, being one of a kind._

        “But now we have a new kind,” Cary said. “A different kind.”

         _I don’t buy it,_ Kerry said.

Oliver was obsessed with dreams for the same reason that Cary was obsessed with bodies. His “gift” was to go into a dreamlike state in which he could travel through a sort of spiritual world that was and wasn’t reality, in which he could or couldn’t change the building blocks of the world, and sometimes see (but sometimes not) into people’s minds. It was hard to understand. Oliver said he couldn’t explain it, that it was like trying to describe a fourth dimension to someone who thought in three. Cary ought to have found this insulting, but it sounded familiar. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like!” Later, while Kerry was bouncing quarters off a living room wall that Oliver had transformed into lime Jell-O to show off his gift, they bent their heads together over a list Oliver had made of potential others. The list wasn’t anything so simple as names and addresses. It was descriptions, impressions, sometimes nicknames or drawings of scenery. “I think I’m getting better at it,” Oliver said. Cary leaned closer, conscious of the single, short, electric moment when his wrist brushed the back of Oliver’s wrist.

        “Give it a chance,” Cary said. “You might meet someone you like.”

         _You mean like you like Oliver? No thanks. It makes you stupid._

        “That’s not very nice. And it’s not true.”

         _It is true._

        “Liking people doesn’t make you stupid." 

        Kerry said, _Think what you want. Good thing one of us has a clear head_.


	3. Chapter 3

Two weeks after Cary’s thirteenth birthday, Kerry ran away from home. She did this in the middle of the night, slipping out of Cary’s body like she might’ve slipped out of a window, locking the front door of the house quietly and putting the spare key under the mat. Through the thin black dark of a Montana November, she walked to the Clark Fork River and started following it east. There were trails there that led past University Mountain and wound into the hills. She picked one to follow. Almost immediately the city dwindled behind her, until the only source of electric light came from lonely cars drifting down Highway 200. It was very cold. Unseen animals rustled in the grass.

Cary awoke from a dream in which he was alone on an Antarctic ice floe. He’d been reading the memoirs of Ernest Shackleton before he went to sleep, so it seemed like a perfectly ordinary kind of dream, except for how vivid it was: the ice, the ache in his bones, his full-body shivers, the sense that he was being pulled inexorably out to sea. Even after waking up, he felt like he couldn’t wake up. He was in his bedroom, turning on his bedside lamp, but at the same time he was having a dream in which he was walking through a wood that smelled of ice and cedar, small twigs cracking under his feet. His breath burned in his mouth. The air was very dark.

He looked for Kerry, who never went far. (She couldn’t go far; she still looked like she was about eight.) He didn’t want to wake their mother, so he crept quietly from room to room. Really he knew, though, that she was gone. He could feel it inside him. He didn’t know how to describe the feeling; he thought it was how birds must feel, with their scooped-out bones. After a few minutes, it turned into panic. He couldn’t remember ever having been alone before. He didn’t like it. He had to put his fist in his mouth and bite down on it to stop himself from making a scared sound.

He put on his boots and goose down parka, and crept fast and silently out of the house. There was an indecisive moment on the sidewalk, but almost immediately he found that he knew where to go. He too headed east when he reached the river, which was partly frozen, ice choking up its banks. It helped that his legs were longer— he’d hit his growth spurt, and he was all spindly, awkward preteen boy— and that Kerry had stopped walking. She was cold, and she had curled up against a tree trunk, and was playing a nonsense hand-clapping game that they’d invented back when they were both still eight:

_Thumb and ring and pinky swear_   
_Crows crossed a mountain and caught a bear_   
_Bear in a trap said, “Run crows run!”_   
_Two crows twice as fast as one._

_Crows crossed a mountain and caught a snake_   
_Snake in a trap is a big mistake_   
_Big crow, little crow, better hide_   
_That old snake’s mouth is open wide!_

_Crows crossed a mountain and got some bread_   
_“There’s just one loaf,” the first crow said._   
_The second crow said, “We two can share.”_   
_Thumb and ring and pinky swear._

When he found her, she was inventing a new verse in which the crows caught a lion, trying to rhyme _lion_ with _flying._ She had never been as good with rhymes as him. He saw the moment she noticed he was there, and saw that she hadn’t been able to see him coming the way he had seen her out on the trail. He didn’t like this, the idea that they were imbalanced. He’d hoped that she could get some kind of warmth from him. But the connection was one way, it seemed. They both got colder and colder.

He stopped in front of her. She was pretending not to see him. He pretended not to be upset. “You better share up with me,” he said. “Your ears are so cold it’s giving me a headache. And I didn’t bring an extra coat.”

Kerry kicked a scruff of dirt and pine needles at him. “I hate you! Go away!” she said. “I’m never coming back!” She wrapped her arms around her middle.

“Okay,” Cary said. He couldn’t remember anything he’d done to make her hate him. “I’m not sure that’s going to work, though. Biologically. We should probably figure that out first. So maybe you should just come back for tonight, and we can do some experiments.”

“I don’t want to! I never want to see you again!”

“That’s a mean thing to say,” Cary said. “That hurts my feelings.” Boys weren’t supposed to get their feelings hurt, but he did. He thought he had too many feelings, probably, because of Kerry— sometimes the ones that were hers were also his, so it got hard to tell which were whose feelings.

“I don’t care!” Kerry said, but she must’ve cared, because the next minute her face screwed up and she burst into furious tears, big ugly tears with lots of snot. She gave a torn-out sob that was halfway to a shout and punched the nearest pine tree as hard as she could.

Cary grabbed her shoulder. “That’s my hand, too,” he said. “Stop. Stop. Look, just— share up with me, okay? Can you just share up with me?” He’d meant his voice to sound firm, but it sounded wobbly instead.

Kerry flailed her fists against him, still crying. “You’re growing up!” she said. It was hard for him to understand her. “You’re growing up, and I’m _not_! I’m never going to grow up! I’m stuck being little and _stupid_ and you’re going to _grow up_ and get old and _die!_ ”

Abruptly she and he were them. Cary reeled back and sucked in air; he felt like Kerry had hurled herself into their body. Their hand hurt where she had punched the tree with it, and they were cold, so cold, that clumsy aching blunt-knife cold. It took him a minute to get used to it. Then he could feel her: her misery, skittish and huddled, like a hurt animal somewhere in their belly. Even so, he was glad— or something like glad. The names for feelings had been made up by normal people, so there probably wasn’t a name for what he really was. He was whatever a person is when one half of their body goes missing, and then they finally find it again.

“You can’t _do_ that,” he said. His voice was even more wobbly now. He scrubbed at their face. Their eyes were leaking tears, which he thought were her tears, because he had no reason to cry. “You can’t just leave. I was worried.”

_Sorry_ , Kerry said.

“What if I didn’t wake up? What if I didn’t find you?”

She didn’t answer that; she just felt unhappy.

“Do you really hate me?” he asked. He dug the heels of their hands into their eye sockets, trying to stop the crying. Boys weren’t supposed to cry.

_No_ , Kerry said. _I’m sorry._ Then: _What’s going to happen to me?_ _I don’t want to not grow up._

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think there is a you, really. Or a me. I think there’s pretty much just an us.”

_I don’t want to be a baby forever._

“You’re not a baby. You’re just Kerry.”

Silence.

_I think I want to go home now, please,_ she said.

So they went home. By the time they reached the eastern edge of town, the first hint of the sun was starting to show— just a feeling that the air was getting lighter. The streets were empty, streetlights flashing at vacant intersections. The windows of the houses they passed were dark. They might have been the only people in the world. Cary wondered if that would be easier for Kerry. It had never occurred to him that being them was hard for her, harder than it was for him. Now he thought that of course it was. Everything seemed tilted in his favor. He had a mother, even if he didn’t have a father. He had school and church and piano lessons. Kerry mostly had to pretend not to exist. She said she didn’t mind, because church was dumb and school was boring and she didn’t want a mother anyway, and it wasn’t like she wasn’t there for that stuff. They both were. Cary had never considered that Kerry might have lied.

Their mother was still asleep when they reached the house. They crept down the long hallway to their bedroom, shed coat and hat and gloves, and climbed into bed. They pulled the covers up over their head. It was warm and safe in there.

“Even if you never grow up,” Cary said, “it doesn’t matter. It’s not like we’re going to stop being us. Never ever.”

_I know._

“I’ll buy a big house outside Kalispell, up in the mountains, and we’ll have horses that you can ride, and you can lasso mountain goats, and there won’t be any boring grown-up business.”

_Will there be bears? I want to wrestle bears._

“They have bears up there.”

_Then I guess that’s okay._

Later, of course, they would realize that Kerry _was_ growing up— just at a much slower pace. Was that worse, Cary wondered, or better? He didn’t know. And he could never bring himself to ask. He felt like it was something he had done to her, even though that was stupid. The two of them had just been born like this. He put his guilt in a small box at the back of his mind, where he hoped that she would never see it. He tried not to think about her small fists in the forest, lashing out and pushing her pain into him. _How dare you? How dare you leave me behind?_ I won’t, he thought to himself. Never. Pinky swear.


End file.
